Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Chapter Twenty-Two

When he came to the next morning, he was hanging from a crude framework by his wrists. The Ratbags had taken him from Exodus and none too gently. They gave him a quick beating to take the fight out of him and after what he’d been through, there wasn’t much fight left. They roped him, gagged him, and threw him in the back of a truck. Whether it was the beating or the rest of it, he couldn’t say, but he went out cold and woke up like this. He was still dressed, still wearing his colors, and still sprayed down with gore from the zombies.

Every fucking day, he thought as he peered around the Red Hand encampment, things just get worse. You get farther away from your brother Disciples and farther away from that compound and the bio there. And farther away from Red Eye.

Now what?

What in the hell did these assholes want with him?

About an hour after he came out of it, the guy who’d taken him prisoner, the dude with the submachine gun, came over with five men trailing behind him. He was dressed in dirty camo fatigues like the others. He was white-haired, craggy-faced, and seemed to have some sort of bearing that the others lacked.

“You’re awake, eh?”

“Sure.”

“Suppose you want to be set free?”

“I was thinking that.”

The old guy nodded. “I’m Valdez,” he said. “I’m in command here. You’re my prisoner.”

“Okay. What do you want with me?”

Valdez just stood there, staring at him. “You’re Slaughter?”

“Yeah. I been called that.”

“You’re the one that mixed it up with some of us in Wisconsin. Killed a few of us.”

“So now you’ve got me.”

“Now I’ve got you.” He whispered something to one of the other men. “Question is: what do we do with you?”

“What use am I to you?”

“None that I can see. Of course, we could use a guy like you. You could join up with us.”

“The Hand? No, I’m already patched-in with a different club. I don’t flip patches for no one.”

“I suppose I could kill you.”

“Figured you’d get to that.”

“Uh-huh.” Valdez stroked his chin. “We could torture you… but why expend the energy on a booger-eater like you? You’re strong. You’d make a good slave. A good camp boy to do all the shit nobody else likes. But then we’d have to feed you. And, sooner or later, a guy like you would start killing us to get free.”

It was quite a quandary, all right. Slaughter was amazed at how quickly the Red Hand grapevine worked. They must have been watching for him. Now they had him. Valdez was playing games. Slaughter had killed some Ratbags, they wanted payback. They were going to punish him and he knew it, but Valdez was playing his mindgames, acting like he didn’t know what he was going to do when he’d probably made up his mind long ago.

“See, Slaughter, the thing is that I’ve been pretty much ordered to execute you. That comes from higher up, as a favor to other Red Hand units that you put the hurt on. It’s a brotherhood thing… and you understand brotherhood, do you not?”

Slaughter said nothing. He didn’t even bother smiling at the absurdity of such a thing. Brotherhood? Brotherhood? What did a weasel like this squeeze of shit know about brotherhood? What could he possibly know about standing with your brothers shoulder to shoulder and fighting and killing, taking lives and giving them, being splashed with blood and going down only to rise again by the hands of your brothers? This guy didn’t know shit. A fucking marionette. A clown.

Valdez was going on about how tough it was to be in his position. Like anyone else, he claimed, he had orders to follow from higher up. But then, on the other hand, he had to interpret those orders and make them work in a practical fashion. So, yes, he was told to punch Slaughter’s ticket as a favor to his brothers of the Red Hand (Slaughter tried not to laugh at that), but if he did that he had to do it in such a way that he would not be wasting manpower and resources and his little community would actually get some benefit from it.

“So you see my problem, do you not?”

“It’s tough being on the top.”

Valdez ignored the sarcasm. “What to do, what to do?”

“Just put a fucking bullet in my head and be done with it,” Slaughter suggested. “How much manpower does that take?”

Valdez smiled. He was beginning to like this biker. As opposed to so many of his own men, this guy was absolutely fearless. “Well, that’s a point well taken, my friend. But honestly… that’s so simple and cold-blooded it nearly offends me.”

Slaughter just hung there, his arms numb from the wrists to the shoulder. All he wanted at that moment was to be cut free. If that meant he got a bullet, then so be it. He was starting to think this entire ride was a big zero. Nothing but trouble.

“Wait… I think I have a solution,” Valdez said. He motioned to a couple of his bully boys and they came over, flashing knives. They sliced Slaughter’s bonds and he fell to the ground. It took him a good five minutes to get the feeling back in his arms. But Valdez was a patient man. He had nothing but time. Now that Slaughter was free, the other Ratbags had their weapons on him. They didn’t trust him and Slaughter had to respect that. Because he had been beginning to think how easy it would have been to take a knife from one of these stooges. Just a few seconds would be all he would need. Grab the nearest one, stomp his kneecap and smash his Adam’s apple, take his knife and put it against Valdez’s throat. By the time the other limp dicks got their weapons up, he’d already have their boss hostage.

But they weren’t that dumb.

Once he got his blood going again, Valdez dropped him a canteen and he drank down the whole thing. Better. It swept that fuzzy disorientation out of his skull.

“Better?” Valdez asked.

“Sure.”

“Anything else?”

“I could handle a steak.”

“So could I, my friend. Here. We found these on you. Enjoy.” He tossed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter into the dirt. Slaughter shrugged, picked them up and had a few easy drags. “Okay,” he said. “So what do you got in mind?”

“I’ve come up with perfect solution to our problem. One that will take care of my dilemma, entertain my men, and allow you the dignity of dying like a man.”

One of his bully boys chuckled.

Slaughter waited for it while he finished his smoke. All this high drama for nothing. Valdez had it all planned from the moment they strung him up. Why all the theatrics? Just get to it already.

“You see,” Valdez said, “we are a free-ranging group. Our job is to collect up anything and anyone we can find. Food, medicine, weapons, supplies of any sort. But it’s hard work. The farther east we range the more dangerous it is. The Army has a kill-on-sight order as far as we’re concerned. We’ve had some nasty engagements. My men grow tired. Bored. Restless. They need entertainment.”

“And I’m it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Slaughter turned his back on them and had a good long piss. After that, he felt pretty human again save for the stink of zombie gore spattered all over him. But he supposed a shower was out of the question.

“Now that you’re freshened up,” Valdez said, “you’ll take a walk with these gentlemen.”

“Where to?”

Valdez ignored him. “Put him in the cage,” he said. “And tell Benny to bring up Maggot.”

They led Slaughter through the compound at gunpoint. It was a large, sprawling place that looked like part of an old Army base. As it stood, from what he could see of it, it looked pretty indefensible. There were several small encampments enclosed by sandbags and spooled barbwire, but there were great openings in the ramparts that you could have driven a tank through. The wire was old and rusting, the sandbags leaking. A good force could have overrun the entire thing in minutes. He saw scrub forest beyond the perimeter in one direction and fields of high yellow grasses in the other. Perfect cover to mount an attack. As they led him on, he saw that the ground was pitted with bomb craters.

They’re putting you in the cage… what do you think of that?

But he didn’t think much at all about it.

He let himself go cool and easy as he always did before a good action or gang fight. It was the only way to do it. Breathe slowly, rest your muscles, stretch your joints. Don’t tense up until you have to. Conserve energy.

The troubling thing, he figured, was that the farther they led him through the compound the more riders they picked up. People began to follow them, not just soldiers but women, too, until there was a crowd of at least thirty people with more pressing in all the time. They led him to a “cage” that was about thirty square feet enclosed by walls of high chainlink fence. It looked like it might have been a dog pen at one time.

They shoved him through the doorway.

The crowd ringed the cage.

When they started to part like the Red Sea, Slaughter figured there was probably a very good reason for it and he wasn’t wrong on that: a giant of a man came lumbering along. He was closer to seven feet than six, a huge black zombie with a face of mush. Quilts of decay were threaded into his purple-mottled flesh. He was absolutely gigantic, his body perforated with wounds that oozed a clear slime, and Slaughter figured he weighed well over three-hundred pounds. He was led by five soldiers.

His wrists were tied behind his back and they had a dog collar on him, each pulling him along with lengths of chain attached to it. And they were struggling. The giant was making growling, slobbering noises and that’s about as close to speech as it got with him. There were flies all over him and a violent stink not unlike potatoes rotted to soft white pulp emanated from him.

They led him into the cage and forced him to his knees. They unhooked his collar chains and untied his wrists and then beat hell out the door, chaining it shut and slapping a Masterlock on it.

So this was Maggot.

At first, he paid absolutely no attention to Slaughter. He went right at the chainlink walls, screeching and growling and snapping his teeth. He shook the fence and made the gawkers out there take more than one step backwards. He raged at the walls that held him in, trying to bull his way through and when that didn’t work, he raised his fungi-webbed fingers into the sky and let out an animal roar.

“We told Maggot he could eat you when he was done with you,” Valdez said through the storm fence. “Incentive, you know.”

Maggot turned on Slaughter, just staring at him.

From chin to eye socket, his face was a festering ulcerated cavern eaten through the flesh and right down to the bone in places. He had one good eye, a yellow, rheumy thing swimming in a soup of gummy putrescence; the other was just a ragged pocket of serous drainage. When he opened his mouth, it was filled with maggots.

Slaughter kept his distance as the giant shambled in his direction.

He knew he could only play this game so long.

One thing he was keeping in mind was that Maggot was blind on his left side and his working eye didn’t look like much to begin with. That was something. So Slaughter felt him out, keeping to Maggot’s left, now and again getting into his field of vision to see if the zombie could sight him in. He did, but only when he was close.

Work that, Slaughter told himself. That’s your edge.

He kept moving away to the left, keeping Maggot turning in circles while the crowd jeered and made with their catcalls. He knew he wasn’t putting on the show they wanted and he planned on keeping it that way.

But he got distracted by something—a bottle probably—shattering against the fence. That’s when Maggot charged in for the kill. As he reached out, Slaughter did the only thing he could think of—he jabbed him in the face with clenched fists, four or five good shots that would have put any living man to his knees. But Maggot did not go to his knees. He stumbled back from the ferocity and quickness of the attack, his face breaking open like a sore and spilling a foul-smelling ooze but that was about it.

He grinned with a mouth of broken teeth.

“GET HIM, MAGGOT!” one of the Ratbags called. “TEAR HIS FUCKING THROAT OUT! EAT HIS FUCKING LIVER!”

Slaughter kept to the giant’s left side again.

Maggot kept trying to compensate, probably trying to figure out in his rotting brain why this food would not keep still so he could take a good bite out of it. Still, despite his frustration, Maggot managed to maintain his sunny disposition. He grinned at Slaughter, fixing him with that one flat and lifeless eye like a cow considering the cud it was about to chew.

In a surprising show of stealth, he stumbled about blindly and then lashed out peripherally to where he thought the food might be. But that damn food just would not cooperate. It drilled him with several wild roundhouse punches but it didn’t get away fast enough. Maggot took hold of it and it was wild and squirming in his grip. He lashed out with a meaty black fist and caught the food in the face and just as he was about to reap the rewards with his teeth, the food got one of its legs behind him and brought it back into the undersides of Maggot’s knees, pushing at the same time and Maggot flipped into the dirt.

The crowd hissed and threw more bottles, stones, anything that wasn’t tied down.

As Maggot rolled in the dirt, trying to right himself, Slaughter kicked him in the head with his motorcycle boot and a great chunk of meat and skull dislodged from the impact.

Maggot shrieked.

The crowd screamed.

Slaughter grabbed up a handful of rocks that made it over the top of the fence and threw them back at the crowd. A couple of them hit and people swore. A few bottles came now. Not just at the fence but over the top of it. One of them glanced off the giant’s head as he stood up uneasily, but he never even noticed.

Maggot charged and Slaughter ducked away from him.

When Maggot came around again, Slaughter jumped up and gave him a drop kick that put the zombie back on his ass. As he clawed around, trying to stand, Slaughter kicked him in the face two and then three times. By then, Maggot’s soft and puffy face was a drooping, liquid mass of excrescence.

But it did not slow him.

He was up and ready for more.

Slaughter knew that all he was doing were delaying tactics. Because without a weapon in his hands, he could beat the giant for hours and it would have little effect other than to tire himself out.

Maggot came around again.

Slaughter backpedaled, his boot rolling on one of the bottles, and he lost his balance. That’s all Maggot needed to gain the advantage. Before Slaughter could get his feet under him properly and his equilibrium in line, Maggot came at him like a fighter in the tenth round going in for the kill. He gave Slaughter a shot to the temple with one fist and then another to the jaw in rapid succession. The zombie was incredibly strong and the second blow sent Slaughter spinning in the dirt. He tried to rise up, his head rioting with stars, but another fist from Maggot put him down.

He lay there, dazed, confused, spitting blood, and wondering if he really had anything left to fight with. He saw it all in perspective in that moment as the crowd cried out for his blood, the hate coming off of them hot and rancid. His entire life spent hitting and being hit, fighting with fists and knives, going down and rising up, taking lives and stomping faces. Where had it gotten him? Here, that’s where. In the dusty hard-packed clay of a cage with this flesh-eating monster while the citizens pressed in like hungry dogs. Civilization. He’d never had much respect for it because he’d always been on the outside, but as he looked at Maggot coming for him yet again and saw the near-orgasmic thrill it gave the animals beyond the wire, he knew if there’d ever been such a thing as civilization—which he doubted—that it was long gone now and the human race had finally taken off its genteel mask of sophistication and refinement. It was midnight at the masquerade and all bets were off. The human race showed its yellow fangs and slobbering mouth, it raised its dirty backside to the world and extended its middle finger. Ha, ha, ha, what a good gag it all was! Us… the human race, pretending to be educated and enlightened, compassionate and charitable, the children of a higher god! What a fucking lark! But that’s all done now. So see us, every man and woman and child, in our unfettered primal fuck-you-and-yours-I-got-mine savage, selfish, simian glory! Look upon the true face of the race: hatred and intolerance, bloodlust and gluttony, the killer ape fresh from the dark jungle flaunting every one of the seven deadly sins, reveling in them and rolling in their iniquity like pigs in shit!

“Welcome home… citizens,” Slaughter said under his breath.

Another Zen moment.

Of all times.

But, as usual, it slowed the flow and stilled the frame and let him see reality not as people wanted it to be but as it truly was. Amazing. All these years he thought citizens were limp-wristed, weak, and wan… but the truth was that they hid their true natures behind that thin yellowing membrane they called civilization and this is what they really were: animals. By God, all the 1%ers had raged against them all these years never realizing that, under the skin, all human beings were inherently 1%ers.

But by then, of course, the revelations ceased because Maggot took hold of him. Picking him up off the ground as if he weighed about as much as a feather pillow, lifting him up over his head—that drove the crowd absolutely wild and orgasmic—and throwing him through the air against the fence. The impact was painful and so was the fall that followed. But when Slaughter hit the dirt, he came up grinning, wiping blood from his face, knowing that if he accomplished nothing in this life he must, above all things, totally fuck-up things for the animals out there.

He must piss on their parade and shit in their party punch.

And he saw just how to do it.

Maggot had him again. He lifted him up, pressing him against the fence and Slaughter got his elbow against the zombie’s throat so those teeth couldn’t get at him. Maggot’s tomb-breath was hot and feverish in his face.

“KILLLLLL HIIIIIMMMMMM!” the crowd called out.

“GET HIM, MAGGOT!”

“PULL HIS STOMACH OUT! EAT HIS FUCKING SPLEEN!”

Maggot was worked up into a wild delirium by then. He needed to get his teeth into the food so that he could fill himself with it but the food was strong, the food was cunning, the food fought back with amazing agility. But he would win because he always won in the end… but then the food reached one hand out and dug its clawing fingers into the side of Maggot’s neck where there was a bloated purple-blue pouch of rot and worms. It was soft as the flesh of a rotten peach and those fingers dug in there, tearing at the pouch and ripping it open in a gushing of graveworms and fetid meat. Those claws took hold of something more substantial and yanked, pull, tore, ripped.

Maggot screamed as a great chunk of muscle and meat was torn out of his throat. The action made his head slump to the side, made his neck feel like rubber.

He dropped Slaughter.

The crowd booed and hissed; they did not like this.

“C’MON, MAGGOT!”

Maggot, his head bobbling, went down to one knee, fingers trying to halt the flow of ichor and liquefied tissue from his throat. Slaughter came at him and kicked him in the face. That head snapped back on the damaged neck, spraying corpse goo, the left cheekbone shattered to running pulp. And the muscles that held his one good eye in place went flaccid and it popped out of the socket, dangling back and forth.

Maggot made a whining, almost pathetic sound.

He was trying to stand. He finally did… almost. But as he made it up, wobbling from side to side, Slaughter gave his left, and weaker, kneecap a jumping stomp that shattered it and dropped him back down, crippled and moaning.

It was easy then.

Slaughter grabbed one of the rocks and smashed one of the bottles that had been thrown until he had a good shank of jagged glass. He slashed Maggot’s dangling eye with it, blinding him. Then he slashed his throat, two, three, four times as the zombie’s hands sought him out. Slaughter darted in again and slashed it across the opening in the side of the throat he’d made with his fingers. Maggot’s head slumped to his shoulder.

He was almost done now.

The crowd had grown noticeably quiet.

Maggot could barely hold himself up on his knees.

Slaughter slashed at his throat again and again, cutting deeper and deeper. With a barking noise, Maggot rolled over into the dirt. Slaughter jumped on him and cut free the last few ligaments that held his head in place. Using his knee as a brace, his snapped the vertebrae and twisted Maggot’s head free… then he swung it around and around and threw it like discus out into the crowd that screamed and scattered.

They probably would have shot him down at that point.

But the sky had scabbed over purple-and-blue like a contusion and yellow forks of lightning split it open.

The rain began to fall.

And people ran.